


Where Feet May Fail

by pendragonness



Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, OT3, Post-Finale, eventually, post-reunion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 05:05:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10937589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendragonness/pseuds/pendragonness
Summary: "Do you ever plan to tell me about John Silver?"“I did already tell you. He was my..quartermaster, eventually. He was a lot of things.”





	Where Feet May Fail

**Author's Note:**

> Because there's no way Silver could have left Flint like that without Flint ever thinking of him again..

When James finally released Thomas – or maybe when Thomas finally released James, it was impossible to say for sure – and they had stood for many minutes leaning into each other, Thomas murmuring and sighing words of love and comfort, James hardly able to do more than whimper and shake; when they both finally found the air real enough to breathe again, and the ground sure enough to stand upon, only then did James McGraw look toward the direction from which he'd arrived.

There was nothing – no one – to see. No trace of the horse and rickety carriage that had borne him to this place. No lingering familiar faces. No familiarity of any sort, save the fantasy of Thomas beside him that was too overwhelming to yet be true. There was no John Silver; the man had faded into the Georgian air like a fanciful story James might have conjured to comfort himself over the past years of horror. A story that was over and could be retired to a shelf to gather dust, with no need to ever dwell upon it again.

James swallowed, his tired, tear-wet eyes racing over the scenery around him, confirming and re-confirming what appeared to be true: John Silver was gone, without a farewell. James trembled.

“Is something the matter?” Thomas murmured, and James immediately turned back to him.

The man was still tall, still blonde within the grey that had reached him, still handsome and beautiful and intelligent and strong, still Thomas. And he was real, something that could be touched. He'd always been real and always been here.

James reached for his hand again to stop the sensation of falling, and Thomas took it with a tender smile.

“James?” He asked, prodding.

“He's...” James looked behind him again, struggling to find words for what he felt, what he meant. “I didn't realize he'd gone.”

“The man who brought you here?”

“Yes.”

“He brought you here..by choice?” James nodded, his pale green eyes racing across Thomas's face as if afraid he would run out of time, and then risking a glance down the dirt road where the carriage had gone, and back to Thomas's face. Thomas smoothed his hand over James's head comfortingly, stroking the short hair, desperate to calm the traces of frantic unease he saw in his lover's eyes.

“Would you like us to get him back? I'm sure that can be managed, it hasn't been long-”

“No,” James breathed the word in a rush, and Thomas stopped in surprise. “No, this...we discussed this. It was..agreed.”

“Are you sure? James?” Thomas studied the man before him, and while he saw echoes of a vague grief, he was merely kissed again in response.

-

Thomas was sure a change of location would help. Within the handful of days since he had been reunited with James, he could tell something still hadn't healed. The ex-pirate captain had a distant part in his mind, and a flickering sadness in his eyes, traits which only revealed themselves when Thomas wasn't meant to notice. But clearly, the more than ten years apart had dulled James's memory of just how observant his lover could be.

It made sense that the plantation would disastify James, who was so used to his own rule, and with what seemed to be very little effort, Thomas mentioned the possibility of leaving the place and then, it was done. Something shifted in James, as if a man that had been standing unnoticed in the shadows suddenly made himself clear, and everything that was familiar about him seemed a little harder, a little sharper. Thomas understood, and he followed with revered fascination and adoration as Captain Flint stole them away from the Savannah estate in the crisp dark night.

The freedom of their own, independent, open lives should have been the cure, at least to Thomas's mind. He was living in a dream, one he'd quite truly never considered. Free, both physically and emotionally, and with James. And they could be like this – would be like this – forever. Except: one time too many, Thomas caught his partner glancing around an open space as if waiting, expecting. But it wasn't mentioned.

When James slept, he slept hard and deep, as a man who hadn't had true rest in centuries. But more often than not, when he awoke, it was with a panicked start, alarmed at the solidness of land, and with almost – Thomas could see it, he didn't know how, but he could – a name on the man's lips. Yet it was never spoken and never addressed; the ghostly images in James's mind never made themselves clear. And it wasn't mentioned.

They came across a very small, very ruined one-room cabin, or shack, more like, and it was mutually agreed to be suitable. Over the years, Thomas had become rather decent at working with his hands, and he was delighted as a school boy to see James take this in. James smiled often, possibly more often than he had a decade ago, but it was not quite the same smile. When he laughed – God, such a laugh -, yes, maybe it could be the same, but the smile was so much older and had been sad for so long. Thomas had a hundred thousand questions but he also had time, a precious, delicious excess of time, and he knew eventually those questions and concerns would be answered. But James needed that time too. They, together, needed that time. There was a reason James jumped so often, slept so hard, woke so unpleasantly, and constantly looked to the horizon. And eventually, it would come forth. It had to.

-

“Do you ever plan to tell me about John Silver?” Thomas asked at the end of their supper one night, and James paused, his hand in a bucket of warmed water he was using to rinse the dishes. Thomas couldn't see his face.

“I did already tell you,” James started, his voice unsteady, “he was my..quartermaster, eventually. He was a lot of things.”

“I know,” Thomas murmured, and his tone earned him a glance from his lover. There it was, that flutter of something distant in James's green eyes.

Weeks had passed and Thomas had answers, but they were scattered and, on this point, unsatisfying. So much time had wasted away from them in their time apart, such horrors had befallen both of them, it was hard to say if their lives would ever truly be revealed to one another. Thomas understood there were things that had happened to him which he had not spoken of yet, and so he gave James the space and peace he needed. Or rather, he had done so for as long as he could manage. Now, the haunted air that crept across James's shoulders time and again seemed increasingly apparent to Thomas, and he feared what it would do in an extended duration.

“Will you _really_ tell me about John Silver?” He prodded. James dried his hands, not looking his partner in the eye, and slowly sat down in the chair opposite, every movement measured. “Is that alright to ask?”

James nodded, and then he sighed, a sigh that released the tension in his shoulders and cast lines of weariness in his face. A sigh of relief.

Finally, he told stories of his decade of life at sea that focused entirely on John Silver, rather than mentioning his importance and then intentionally keeping the man on the sidelines of the tale. James told of how Silver sacrificed his leg, his health, his trust, his companionship, and his peace of mind. He explained of how close the younger man's mind had become with his own, the refuge the man had been after Miranda too had been taken from James's life. And then the stories faltered, and weakened; there was a dark turn in the recollections that James hesitated to address.

Thomas reached across the small space between them and took one of James's rough hands in his own, stroking his thumb across the knuckles.

“Something happened between you two?” he asked gently.

James's face was filled with a stress that Thomas could not understand, and he saw the words beneath the surface of James's eyes, refusing to come out. “We had different goals, in the end. I thought we were the same. But...I was wrong.”

“You argued?”

A wistful smile that was both melancholy and bitter fluttered across James's face. “We fought.”

Thomas intertwined his long fingers with his partner's, hoping his touches would sooth.

“Silver won,” James's voice was barely even a whisper, and the only thing Thomas could see on him was the weight of tremendous sadness.

“Is that why you're here?” Thomas asked, “Is that how you found me?”

But he wasn't going to get the answer to that question, not just yet. It was still too much for his lover to address and explain – and Thomas was understanding why.

“James,” he said the man's name to get his attention, to remind him of where he was, who he was with. Nervous, sea-foam green eyes struggled to meet his own. Thomas swallowed, and then forced out his words: “You loved him?”

James actually seemed surprised by the suggestion, and in no little degree, confused. His back straightened, the lines of grief left his face, and he frowned. “No,” he retorted, the very word defensive and skeptical.

“ _James_ ,” Thomas replied, and his soft tone was a reprimand.

The red-haired man resisted for a moment, his eyes calculating, trying to understand what he was being told to acknowledge and address, and eventually, he relented, in his way.

“He left me,” James whispered, and Thomas felt a tremor make its way through the hand he caressed. “He..he found you, he gave me you, and then...he was gone. As if he never existed at all.”

Thomas stood, knowing his dear was done for the night, and he drew James into his arms. The man clasped on to him in a trembling embrace and Thomas held him for a long time, running a hand through the coppery hair that had grown, his fingers threading through a couple inches, and he kissed James's temple with a tenderness that made them both press closer to one another. It was like the day James had come to him on the plantation all over again – a sense of awestruck weakness lay over the tired man, and he was helpless in his lover's arms.

Helpless in this moment, perhaps, but not unguarded. James had revealed something raw and private to Thomas, but it had taken more prodding for less result than Thomas had imagined, and he found it unsettling. James used to be an open book to him, never very clever at hiding his thoughts and feelings from the man he loved. But James had also been a very young man in those times, young and relatively untried. This version of James McGraw still had too many recesses of James Flint within him, and Thomas was not sure they would ever go away.

 


End file.
